Jeff Bowdren

Courtroom clerk, husband, Dad, fan of Notre Dame, Florida Panthers, Chicago Cubs & Minneaota Vikings. Movie buff & music nut. Old school wrestling historian

[Morbid Knowledge @MorbidKnowledge]

Flash Shelton, also known as “Squatter Hunter" fights squatters by moving in with them and making the situation so uncomfortable that they leave, helping homeowners retake control.

Flash Shelton was grieving his father and trying to sell his mother's vacant California home when he got the call. Strangers had moved in.

Police told him it was a civil matter and there was nothing they could do. So he figured out how to become their squatter.

Shelton signed a lease from his mother to establish legal tenancy, drove 19 hours, camped outside waiting for the squatters to leave, then went in, secured the back door, installed cameras, and waited for them to return.

When they came back they found him already inside, legally. That method became the foundation of his entire business.

Once hired, his team secures a short-term lease from the homeowner, moves in alongside the squatters, and makes daily life uncomfortable, taking over common areas, playing loud music, and maintaining constant presence, until the intruders choose to leave voluntarily.

"What I used to save my mom's house, I am now using to help homeowners across the country," he said. "I've built a whole team ready to out-squat the squatters."

The legal genius of it is simple, squatters exploit the same tenant protection laws that protect genuine renters. Shelton just decided to use those same laws against them.

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@DaveLaMont1 @VinnysCorner1 Emlen Tunnell

[Hollywood Horror Museum @horrormuseum]

And the Oscar goes to....

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@FirstNameJ0hn

[Fun Viral Vids 😊 @Fun_Viral_Vids]

French Kiss 💋

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@KrisZellner Respectfully disagree. He was a HUGE star in Florida as part of a 3-way program with Jack Brisco & Buddy Colt. Was also over huge under a hood in Fla as “Mr Florida” in ‘79. Also went to high school with Janis Joplin & head coach Jimmy Johnson! Horrible manager tho.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

There are two types of dogs: those who love water and those who don't

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@HawkEmDownChris Tim Kempton

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@VinnysCorner1

[Scott Hatch @scotthatch22]

One month ago on May 8, the #Cubs went to bed with the best record in baseball and a 5.5 game lead on the Brewers. This morning they wake up 2 games over .500 and 7.5 games behind the Brewers. In 31 days they lost 13 games on the Brewers. This is completely unfathomable. Insane.

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@SeizeTheNae Belinda Carlisle

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@wrigleyvillenat do your listeners a favor. Go back this season and count the number of games that the Cubs have left at least 15 men LOB by game’s end. I get thst Counsell apparently hates playing young guys…,but maybe someone should have a chat with the vets about it??

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@GRCinemaTicket

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@NINaylor I was in the 2nd row that night. Steamboat & Luger was a great match, but the night before in Philly, they had what might have been the best match Luger ever had.

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@KrisZellner @TheRealXPac To me, he is absolute HOFer. Main eventer in the AWA as Suoer Destroyer Mark I (or was it II?), in the Mid Atlantic as the Sarge, in the WWF, back in Mid Atlantic with Don Kernodle tag team, back to the WWF and after a run back in the AWA he returns to the WWF as the turncoat!

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@VinnysCorner1

[🇺🇸 Based Americana 🇺🇸 @basedamericana]

Band of Brothers should be standard viewing in high school history classes across the country.

[Jeff Bowdren @BowdrenJeff]

@VinnysCorner1

[ND Wine n Cheese @nd_winencheese]

Early June and we have:

- Illinois coaches talking about Notre Dame
- Texas radio shows talking about Notre Dame
- Texas Tech coaches talking about Notre Dame
- USC people talking about Notre Dame
- Clemson coaches talking about Notre Dame

And yet Notre Dame is "irrelevant"☘️